Analysing the everyday practices of labour coercion through arbitration court records
The case of a runaway maidservant in Iceland in 1820
Introduction
The following text is a complete transcription of a case that was resolved in the arbitration court in the district of Engihlíð in northern Iceland in 1820:1
ORIGINAL:
Arid 1820 þann 30. Aprilis mættu firir þa höldnum forlíkunar Rétti á Holtastödum þessar persónur: hreppstjóri Sgr. Worm Beck á Geitaskardi, vinnukona hans Arnþóra Ólafsdóttir og Bóndakona Björg Einarsdóttir á Gili í Svartárdal, eptir ádur undanngeinginni klögun velnefnds hreppstjóranns til forlíkunarmanna í Eingihlýdar forlíkunar distrikti, samt firirkalli þeirra, til umgetinna persóna, þess innihalds: ad hérgreind Arnþóra vinnukona hreppstjórans hafi nærstl. 22. þ.m. strokid úr vistinni frá honum, ad Gili í Svartárd. og þar sídan dvalid og forsorgud verid af nínefndri Bóndakonu Björgu Einarsd. eptir ad húsbóndi Arnþóru hafdi þó gagngjördt sendt þangad eptir þessari sinni vinnukonu, enn þó forgefins! Þessi hér af rísandi og áfallinn misklíd milli nefndra persóna, leidist nú þannig, gódmótlega, til lykta: Ad Björg Einarsd afbidur þad sitt fejl vid hreppstjórann ad lída og undirhalda Arnþóru og gottgiörir honum firir sitt hér af risid ómak med 21 fiski í gildum landaurum, samt forlíkunarmönnum sitt kaup, nfl. 64 sk. Þetta gottgiörelse til hreppstjórans frá Björgu – sem af henni skal lokid vera í nærstkomandi fardögum – gefr velnefndr hreppstjórinn Eingihlýdarhrepps fátækum. Sömuleidis bidr Arnþóra Ólafsdóttir audmiúklega sinn húsbónda hr.st. Sr. Vorm B. firirgefningar bædi á þessu sínu burtstroki, samt sérhverju ödru, er hún hefr vid hann misbrotid ad undannförnu, lofar og so jafnframt ad víkja aptr til sinnar vistar og útenda vistar-rád sín hjá hreppstjóranum nærstkomandi krossmessuár og þióna honum med æru og dygd, samt aldrei frammvegis leggja lag sitt saman vid nokkurn þann, sem kinni vilia tæla hana edur afvega leida. Ad þessu soleidis afgeingnu skilja allir partarnir í kjærleika og vinsemd sem full-sáttir. Holtastad ut supra.
Ólafur Thómasson Arnljótur Árnason
Worm Beck Björg Einarsdóttir
Arnþóra Ólafsdóttir
TRANSLATION:
In the year 1820, on 30 April, the following persons were present at a session of the arbitration court held at Holtastaðir: district administrator Seigneur Worm Beck at Geitaskarð, his maidservant Arnþóra Ólafsdóttir, and farm mistress Björg Einarsdóttir at Gil in Svartárdalur, in accordance with summons sent to them following a previous complaint lodged by the prestigious district administrator to the arbitration committee of the district of Engihlíð, which states that Arnþóra, the district administrators maidservant, had, on the 22. of this month, ran away from her place and gone to Gil in Svartárdalur, where she had been fed and maintained by the named farm mistress Björg Einarsdóttir, even after Arnþóra’s master had sent someone specifically to fetch this maidservant of his, but to no avail! This dispute between the named persons is hereby amicably resolved on the following terms: Björg admits her error in tolerating and maintaining Arnþóra in her home and promises to compensate him for his troubles by paying him 21 fishes in valid currency as well as the arbitration fee of 64 shillings. This compensation from Björg to the district administrator, which should be paid before the upcoming fardagar,2 is in turn donated by him to the Engihlíð district’s poor. In addition, Arnþóra humbly asks her master, district administrator seigneur Worm Beck, forgiveness, both for absconding and for any other misdeed she may have recently committed against him and promises to return to her post as a servant and stay for the remainder of her service period and to serve him with honour and loyalty and from now on to refrain from consorting with anyone who might try to seduce or mislead her. With this dispute hereby resolved, all parties, fully satisfied, depart with solicitude and in friendship.
Ólafur Thómasson Arnljótur Árnason
Worm Beck Björg Einarsdóttir
Arnþóra Ólafsdóttir
The case of the runaway servant Arnþóra Ólafsdóttir was thus amicably solved through an accord facilitated by the local arbitration committee. Arnþóra returned to her place as a servant and remained there for another year. Order had been restored and life returned to ‘normal’. Yet, this act of everyday resistance by a young maidservant lives on through its documentation in the proceedings of the arbitration court and it obtains an interpretative meaning far beyond its minor significance to the people involved and their everyday lives or personal histories. Yet this documentation – in its fragmentary nature – also leads to further questions and methodological problems for the scholar who might wish to make use of this case or others like it. Indeed, Arnþóra comes “into archival view” – as Marisa J. Fuentes has succinctly put it – in a manner which frames, shapes and ultimately limits the historization of her archival presence.3
As various scholars have argued, archives contain only that which Carolyn Steedman has labelled “stories caught half-way through: the middle of things; discontinuities.”4 They contain narratives that have, since the moment(s) they describe and discuss occurred until they are written down on the page and preserved in a particular archive, been processed through several filters of (mis)representation, (mis)remembering, (mis)understanding, reformulation and contextualization, a documentation that reflects the power relations that are revealed in its creation and which reinforces their inherent dynamics of coercion. This process of “epistemic violence” has a formative influence on any meaning that can be ascribed to the words in the document and their analysis.5
This paper asks how a careful and informed reading of the archives of arbitration proceedings can help to understand the power dynamics of labour coercion as they were put to practice in nineteenth-century Iceland. In the following, I argue that a reading that focuses on the social practices described in the text might be a fruitful approach as it evades the epistemological problem of whether, or to what degree, the account is true or accurate. By discounting ultimately irrelevant questions on abstract notions such as the authenticity, or accuracy, of the text’s representation of the events that took place, this approach emphasises instead the analytical value of the practices described in the arbitration proceedings regardless of whose version of ‘what actually happened’ the text represents, of how or why the account took its eventual shape and regardless of its inherent discontinuity.
Instead, we can infer from the text a handful of facts that we can further use to analyse these power relations. Thus, we can without doubt assume that Arnþóra did indeed abscond from her service in Geitaskarð and take refuge at a nearby farm, staying there for about seven days. We can also plainly see that she apologised for her actions at the session of the arbitration court. Although we cannot say anything for certain about her level of sincerity or indeed who was the author of the apology as it is recorded in the proceedings, we can analyse the act – or practice – of apologising in itself, and its meaning, its causes, and its effects. Thus, while the narrative form of arbitration proceedings both limits and shapes the interpretative potential of their content as it reflects and in some ways reinforces the social hierarchies and the coercive apparatus of the dominant social order in nineteenth-century Iceland, a focus on practices makes it possible for scholars to read “along the archival grain” to allow for a broader spectrum of interpretations. Through further contextualization, one can thus make use of such sources to write an alternative historical discourse, as Edward Said called it, of subaltern practices of defiance and negotiation; a history from below.6
Compulsory service in pre-industrial Iceland
Compulsory service was the primary form of labour management in Iceland from the mediaeval era until the turn of the twentieth century, when restrictions on free labour and settlement were gradually lifted.7 Iceland in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was for the most part a rural farming community with the household serving as the fundamental economic unit and site of production. The economy consisted of pastoral farming (raising livestock) on a low technological level and seasonal in-shore fishing.8 Labour power accessible throughout the year for a modest wage (such as live-in servants) was essential to this economy.
As several historians have argued, social stratification in eighteenth and nineteenth-century Iceland was minimal compared to other European countries. For the most part, peasants and servants belonged to the same social class, commonly worked side by side, ate the same food, lived within the same single-room turf cottages, and generally shared a similar life experience.9 There was also significant social mobility where individuals would move back and forth between independence as tenant farmers and periods working as servants.10 Life-cycle service was the perceived norm, however. It was the general expectation that all youth from a peasant background would spend some years as servants before marrying and becoming part of the peasantry.11 Studies have shown that around 80% of servants in Iceland became peasants themselves at some later date, although Icelanders seem generally to have remained servants much longer than in the other Nordic countries, and as much as 10% of men and 20% of women ended up as lifetime servants because they never married.12
Despite the relative egalitarianism of Icelandic society, the labour system in eighteenth and nineteenth-century Iceland nonetheless had a high degree of legal compulsion and physical coercion. All persons (with only a few exceptions) above a certain age who did not run their own household were required by law to become servants in legal households.13 Landless adults in eighteenth and nineteenth-century Iceland thus had little choice in the matter. As servants, they were subject to regulations on master-servant relations as proscribed in a decree on domestic discipline from 1746.14 The decree ordered servants to work ‘with utmost devotion and loyalty for their master’s benefit and respond to any orders they are given with submission and obedience’. It also prescribed a series of rights and duties, including the right of masters to physically punish their servants for any oversight ‘in the same manner as their own children’. Masters were in turn required to treat their servants fairly, feed and clothe them properly, avoid overburdening them with work, and provide them with spare time to practise their Christian duties.15
Arbitration committees
Established throughout the Danish-Norwegian kingdom (including Iceland) in the 1790s as part of a broader reform of the judicial system, arbitration committees had the dual purpose of accelerating the judicial process, and therefore reducing expenses for the state, and providing an avenue for the public to seek justice and restitution in various matters without troubling the ‘normal’ judiciary and without incurring any major expenses. These committees did not have judicial authority and could not sanction penalties. Instead, their purpose was to facilitate accord through a controlled process of mediation led by educated local leaders, generally parish ministers and members of the peasantry who had held some official position, such as district administrators (Ice. hreppstjórar). The decrees which formed the legal basis for the work of arbitration committees listed the types of matters that could be brought to arbitration court. These included property disputes (such as boundary disputes between two farms), matters of debt, defamation, marital discord and divorce, and – most importantly for this paper – issues related to legal rights such as breach of labour contracts, withheld wages and so on.16
I am currently leading a project, in cooperation with the National Archives of Iceland, that is building a database of all arbitration proceedings from Iceland in the period 1798 to 1936. While it is still an ongoing project, it has already led to some very interesting preliminary results. Thus, we have discovered that there are at least 280 journals of arbitration proceedings, containing an estimated 35,000 cases, preserved in 15 archives around the country. As of March 2023, the database contains some 26,000 entries. Of these, some 714 cases – or 2,7% – revolve around labour contracts or master-servant relations. If we remove Reykjavík, by far the largest urban town in Iceland in the nineteenth century, and the off-shore islands of Vestmannaeyjar, where the economy and the social structure was significantly different from the mainland, the percentage of service-related cases rises to 4,6% of the total. Looking at individual arbitration districts, however, reveals that service-related cases could be up to 25% of the total in rural farming districts while districts that contain urban settlements generally have a much lower percentage of service-related cases. The archives of arbitration courts thus contain hundreds of master-servant disputes that can be used to analyse labour coercion and the power relations of masters and servants in nineteenth century Iceland.
A preliminary analysis has shown that arbitration courts did indeed become an avenue in the nineteenth century for disgruntled servants and masters to settle their issues, for servants to lay claim to their rights and for masters to demand duties or obedience owed to them. As I have argued elsewhere, arbitration courts were thus an important tool for servants and masters to negotiate the conditions of their relationship and both maintain and test the elasticity of both the written and unwritten rules governing the moral economy of service in pre-industrial Iceland.17
As the main purpose of arbitration committees was to settle disputes in an amicable manner and thus keep the peace in local communities and guarantee the rights of the king’s subjects, the state issued detailed regulations on how arbitration court sessions should take place. Thus, the meetings should take place behind closed doors, and it was not allowed to use witness testimony from outside parties. Instead, the committee should listen to both sides and then attempt to facilitate an agreement. If no agreement could be reached, no information about the case should be documented other than the name of the people involved and the fact that their dispute remained unresolved and could thus be brought to the county magistrate for a standard judicial procedure. If the dispute was settled, the committee was required to write a “verbatim account of the agreement and its conditions and have it signed by all parties involved, if they are able to write.” It would thus acquire the same juridical value as a sentence prescribed by a court of law and the matter should be considered resolved and could not be brought further within the judicial system.18
This strict regulatory framework frames the use-value of arbitration proceedings as historical sources. Unlike standard court records, where one can expect to find a narrative based on interrogations as well as witness testimonies, which provide a variety of details and contextualised representations of events that (presumably) took place, arbitration court proceedings only provide glimpses into the relationship of the persons involved or the nature of the dispute. In worst-case scenarios, the only information that can be gathered from these records is the names of the disputing persons. More commonly, we get the names of the persons involved and a brief description of the nature of their dispute and a sentence or two about how it is resolved. On more rare occasions, one finds accounts such as the one about Arnþóra Ólafsdóttir, where a description of acts, behaviour or attitudes provides insight into social practices and lived relationships and how they were performed in contextually different ways.
Performed subordination and tactics of negotiation
Returning to the case of Arnþóra Ólafsdóttir, there are a few facts that can be extracted from the proceedings of the arbitration court:
- She was a maidservant working for Worm Beck at the farm Geitaskarð.
- She absconded in the spring of 1820 and took refuge with the mistress at the farm Gil, staying there for approximately one week.
- She refused to return when someone was sent to retrieve her.
- She had consorted with someone who was assumed in the proceedings to have seduced or misled her.
- She admitted to her error and apologised for her actions before the arbitration committee, in a manner which reflected her subordinate status, before returning to her post as a maidservant at Geitaskarð.
This, however, still leaves many unanswered questions. Why did she abscond? What was her relationship with the people at Gil? Who was this person she had consorted with and in what way had he or she seduced or misled her?
In this instance, some of these answers can be gleaned from other sources. Later in the same year, a local man named Ísleifur Jóhannesson was brought to court accused of sheep-rustling and several other crimes. From the interrogation records from his trial, it becomes apparent that Arnþóra had become implicated in his crimes. From her interrogation, we learn that one of the tasks that Arnþóra had at Geitaskarð was to mind her master’s sheep as they grazed near the farm. One day in the spring of 1820, Ísleifur showed up where she was tending to the sheep and convinced her to hand over two ewes, one that he had bought from her master and one that he claimed belonged to him, but which was, as it turned out, untrue. He later convinced (or forced) her to sign a document, forged by him, which claimed that he had only taken one sheep. She was later accused but found not guilty of being complicit in this case of grand larceny.19 The family at Gil was closely related to Ísleifur and he had spent considerable time there, which might explain why she sought out that particular farm, although that remains mere speculation. At a bare minimum, one can assume that her absconding from service and subsequent case before the arbitration court was somehow related to this whole unfortunate affair. She may have been punished or threatened with punishment for her involvement or otherwise been led to flee the household as a result of her mishandling of her master’s livestock. The timing of the entire affair, and the people involved, as well as the phrasing used during the arbitration proceedings, indicate as much.
Having other sources to rely on for context is, however, relatively rare. In most cases, we simply have no way of knowing exactly what led a particular servant to abscond, or to talk back to their masters, to disobey their orders, slander them or otherwise contest their authority. Since the law demanded the unconditional obedience of servants, the direct causes or nature of the complaints are rarely discussed in much detail. It was usually enough to establish that the insolent behaviour had taken place. However, acts have interpretative value in and of themselves for any analysis of power relations as a set of social and cultural practices. It doesn’t really matter why Arnþóra (or any other servant, for that matter) ran away or whether her act reflects any intention of hers to resist or criticise her social position. What is of importance is what her absconding says about how people within particular power relations, such as those of master and servant, practised those relations. Acquiescence, compliance, and subordination are other practices that could of course also serve the same analytical purpose and perhaps even lead to different results. But it is usually only transgression – absconding, talking back, stealing – which gets documented, thus allowing historians to dissect the act to interpret and analyse its meaning. It is important to note, as well, that the absence of certain (mostly acquiescent) sets of practices from the documentary evidence does not infer the absence of conflict in lived reality, nor does it suggest the successful coercion of subaltern servants, their false consciousness, or a condition of total domination etc, but merely the absence of any evidence of conflict.20 We are thus left with using those transgressive acts that do get documented in places such as the archives of arbitration committees to analyse how power relations were practised in everyday life.
When viewed from this perspective, Arnþóra’s absconding does not appear as an escape attempt, trying to permanently leave her subordinate servant position, but rather as a tactic of negotiation.21 By putting a safe distance between herself and her master during a time of duress she was, at a later stage, able to perform an act of apology in front of an audience, thereby safeguarding her from any further consequences as the resolution of the arbitration court meant that she was formally and publicly forgiven, in a documented manner, and any further repercussions for the same act of disobedience would thus count as abuse. Through her performance of due deference, the public presentation of order and hierarchy is restored in the household of the district administrator and in the broader community. Yet, Arnþóra had nonetheless, through her actions, drawn a line of demarcation and stood her ground and thereby claimed a certain degree of agency and self-determination within a legally defined, highly coercive, and inherently asymmetrical master-servant relationship.
Conclusion
It should come as no surprise that archives provide at best a fragmentary glimpse into singular – and most often exceptional – moments in the past, that archival materials are not only shaped by the complex and manifold power relations under which they are created but also the history and politics of their preservation through time.22 Archival materials, such as the proceedings of arbitration courts, not only reflect the asymmetrical power relations which they document but are also an important part of their function and serve to legitimise them. In that sense, they are inherently coercive in and of themselves. Any historical analysis of such materials must take that into account. As a representation of historical facts, archives conceal and distort our view of the past as much as they reveal it. This paper suggests that one way to counter this epistemic bias is to focus on the practices described in the text rather than dwell on its authenticity or the truthfulness of its’ representation of ‘what actually happened’. Through such a reading of the case of runaway maidservant Arnþóra Ólafsdóttir, this paper shows how arbitration courts became a setting where servants could, through concerted practices of absconding and a performance of a formal apology, negotiate the terms and conditions of their subordinate social position and their tacit acceptance of their master’s household discipline.
Footnotes
National Archives of Iceland (NAI). XVI: Hún. F. Engihlíð. Book 1 (1799–1890), 24‒25.↩︎
Directly translates to “turnover days” or “travel days”, a period of 11 days in late May/early June when, traditionally, people could move from one tenancy to another, or from one service position to another.↩︎
Marisa J. Fuentes, Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), 3.↩︎
Carolyn Steedman, Dust (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001), 45.↩︎
For further discussion on this, see Fuentes, Dispossessed Lives; Zeb Tortorici, Sins Against Nature: Sex and Archives in Colonial New Spain (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018).↩︎
Edward Said, “Foreword,” in Selected Subaltern Studies, eds. Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Chakravorti Spivak (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), vi. For the concept of reading along the archival grain, see Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009).↩︎
Vilhelm Vilhelmsson, Sjálfstætt fólk: Vistarband og íslenskt samfélag á 19. öld (Reykjavík: Sögufélag, 2017); Magnús S. Magnússon, Iceland in Transition: Labour and Socio-Economic Change Before 1940 (Lund, 1985).↩︎
Vilhelm Vilhelmsson and Emil Gunnlaugsson, “Passports, Permits, and Labour Im/mobility in Iceland 1780s‒1860s” in Moving Workers: Historical Perspectives on Labour, Coercion and Im/Mobilities, eds. Claudia Bernardi, Viola F. Müller, Biljana Stojić and Vilhelm Vilhelmsson, 87‒111 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2023); Guðmundur Jónsson, ‘Institutional change in Icelandic agriculture, 1780–1940’, Scandinavian Economic History Review 41 (1993): 101‒128; Sigurður Gylfi Magnússon, Wasteland with Words: A Social History of Iceland (London: Reaktion books, 2010), 18–32.↩︎
Loftur Guttormsson, Childhood, Youth and Upbringing in the Age of Absolutism: An Exercise in Socio-Demographic Analysis (Reykjavík: Háskólaútgáfan, 2017), 276; Guðmundur Hálfdanarson, “Social distinctions and national unity: On politics of nationalism in nineteenth-century Iceland”, History of European Ideas 21 (1995): 763‒779.↩︎
Gísli Ágúst Gunnlaugsson, Family and Household in Iceland 1801‒1930. Studies in the Relationship between Demographic and Socio-Economic Development, Social Legislation and Family and Household Structures (Uppsala: Uppsala University Press, 1988), p. 61.↩︎
Hálfdanarson, “Social distinctions”, 768–70.↩︎
Árni Daníel Júlíusson, Landbúnaðarsaga Íslands vol. 2 (Reykjavík: Skrudda, 2013), 50; Loftur Guttormsson, “Il servizio come istituzione sociale in Islanda e nei paesi nordici”, Quaderni Storici 23 (1988): 355–379.↩︎
Vilhelm Vilhelmsson, “The Moral Economy of Compulsory Service: Labour Regulations in Law and Practice in Nineteenth Century Iceland,” in Labour Laws in Preindustrial Europe: The Coercion and Regulation of Wage Labour, c. 1350-1850, eds. Jane Whittle and Thijs Lambrecht, 227‒245 (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2023).↩︎
Guttormsson, Childhood, 81–83.↩︎
Lovsamling for Island, indeholdende udvalg af de vigtigste ældre og nyere love og anordninger, resolutioner, instructioner og reglementer, althingsdomme og vedtægter, collegial-breve, fundatser og gavebreve, samt andre aktstykker, til oplysning om Islands retsforhold og administration i ældre og nyere tider, vol. 2, eds. Oddgeir Stephensen and Jón Sigurðsson (Copenhagen: Höst, 1853), 605–620.↩︎
For further reading, see the detailed discussion on the history and role of arbitration committees in: Vilhelm Vilhelmsson, “Inngangur: Sáttabækur sem sögulegar heimildir,” in Sakir útkljáðar: Sáttabók Miðfjarðarumdæmis í Húnavatnssýslu 1798-1865, compiled and edited by Vilhelm Vilhelmsson (Reykjavík: Háskólaútgáfan, 2017), 11‒45.↩︎
See Vilhelmsson, “The moral economy of compulsory service”.↩︎
Vilhelmsson (ed.), Sakir útkljáðar, pp. 189-198, citation on p. 195.↩︎
The affair is discussed in detail in Vilhelmsson, Sjálfstætt fólk, pp. 239‒253.↩︎
For a convincing argument in this regard, see James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990).↩︎
On negotiation as an essential component in all power relations, see Michael J. Braddick and John Walter (eds.), Negotiating Power in Early Modern Society: Order, Hierarchy and Subordination in Britain and Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). The concept of ‘tactics’ is discussed in detail in Vilhelm Vilhelmsson, “Tactics of evasion: The survival strategies of vagrants and day labourers in eighteenth and nineteenth century rural Iceland,” 1700-tal: Nordic Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 17 (2020): 34‒56. DOI: https://doi.org/10.7557/4.5547↩︎
Alessandro Stanziani, Tensions of Social History: Sources, Data, Actors and Models in Global Perspective (London: Bloomsbury, 2023); Francis X. Blouin Jr. And William G. Rosenberg, Processing the Past: Contesting Authority in History and the Archives (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).↩︎